Born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam in 1970, now living in the US as a claimed and renamed TRA

Archive for May, 2007

Lots of reflection going on this week. The little soap opera I’ve got going on in the background has only increased my need to look back, reflect and attempt to get some idea of where I am and where I want to go.

It’s odd to look back at my own mental landscape, see where I’ve been as compared to where I am now. I keep referring to my life as constantly going back to square zero. In a way that’s true, but in way it’s not.

History has not always meant a great deal to me. I figured the past was the past, there was nothing you could do to change it so why bother? In my younger days, I didn’t think to ask. As I grew older, I didn’t want to ask. Now, all I seem to do is ask.

It’s the whys that stand out to me. As a young child, I still thought I was like everyone else. My family’s history was my history. I knew nothing else but life as an American growing up in this little Texas town. My life rarely breached the borders of my county much less those of the US.

Slowly, I was forced to view my world across racial and ethnic lines. There was nothing for me to relate to as the lone other. As I’ve said before, I relied on television, movies and books to find some place for myself. Stereotypical or not, it was something and there was always ET and Tarzan. I laugh sometimes thinking back at how I found my closest associations in the science fiction/fantasy genres.

It was all I had at the time to fill my need to belong to something. Now I can kind of look back on it with a sense of humor, but at the time it was very lonely. I did whatever I could to rid myself of that loneliness, turned to what was available at the time. It’s a consistent pattern throughout my life as most of you know.

I’m not sure how much TRAness plays a part in all my searching. I’m sure it’s had a lot to do with it. Would I have gone to such lengths if I hadn’t been a TRA or even adopted? Would it have been something I just took for granted? I guess it’s just another one of those unanswerable what-if questions.

Now my mind turns towards history and where I belong within it. It’s strange that it took me so long to even consider myself an immigrant. I don’t think I wanted to in my early years. It wasn’t something that I wanted to accept. I’d left Vietnam with a war on my heels. It wasn’t something I wanted people to know so I ran from it and just kept on running.

When people heard “Vietnam,” they immediately thought “Vietnam War” and with that came all the hate, stereotypes and sometimes even pity. I think it was that look of pity that I hated the most. Well, there was the pumped up look some would get as if they’d hand-saved me themselves. “Operation babylift? No, I wasn’t a part of that particular ‘miracle’.” Was I suppose to thank them? That’s another annoyance of mine, but that’s a whole other blog post.

All I really wanted at the time was just to be American. Forget everything else, it was in the past and I’d left it behind to forget about it. I wasn’t a part of it anymore, and I certainly wanted no part of it in my life.

The problem I didn’t foresee was that I didn’t really know what “American” meant any more than I knew what it meant to be “Vietnamese.” My idea of “American” was handed down to me in its small town, Texan, white, Christian form. It was living life as a Muslim that opened my eyes to the narrowness of my thinking. An unusual route to take, I suppose, but one that brought me to this place. Despite everything, I’m glad to be here.

In this here and now, I’m no longer running but have turned around in an attempt to learn and understand my history. On a smaller scale, my genetic history means a lot to me but equally important is my place in the history of Vietnamese adoptees. There were thousands of us and each of us were a part of an even larger picture in how we came to be here. We were immigrants just as much as non-adoptees who came by other means.

I use to bemoan feeling like an outsider when it came to other Vietnamese Americans. It felt as if I had somehow been left out of the history of immigration to this country. Maybe it was just my own isolation speaking, I don’t know. What I do know is that I am a part of that history and the history of Vietnam. It’s mine to claim and that’s what has led me here to blogging and writing.

I must seek to understand how I came to be “here” and write my own story. It’s not up to history to claim me and my part in it nor should I allow others to attempt to speak for me. It’s up to me to grab hold of it and let it become a part of me. I am no more a miracle than I am a tragedy but one small story within a much greater picture. However small my piece may be, it’s mine to tell and it’s time to set the record straight.

Sadiq Alam and Tiel Aisha Ansari have done a beautiful job of putting together the first ever Sufi Poetry Blog Carnival. They have posted it in two parts, one on each of their blogs. Just click on the links and take a look.

It’s both humbling and inspiring to be among so many beautiful souls. Thank you both for putting this together and offering yet another reminder that we all still have much to learn from one another.

Sufis have a saying, “The Beloved is living, the lover is dead.” The first time I read this, I freaked out a little. What does that suppose to mean? It took me a long time to even begin to grasp the meaning of oblivion of the Self, to become an emptiness ready to be filled. While I’m not Sufi and as most people know by now, am spiritually wandering again, the concept in regards to the nature of love itself hasn’t been lost to me.

I’ve put much thought into the subject which may seem impossible given the tone of my blog. But yeah, I do other things other than rant and spit. Love interests me not only on an emotional and physical level but also on a spiritual one. In fact, it’s the spiritual aspects that interest me most of all. From all my experience, I’ve learned that the spiritual part of love endures beyond everything else.

I think too many fairy tales, books and movies among other things have completely fubared my notion of love and what it means. It’s only now that I’m coming out the sappy, shallow illusion that I too readily swallowed in my younger days. They taught me that love was conditional, dependent upon the actions of the object of the emotion. Love created a debt and if the debt wasn’t paid, too bad. I’m not just talking about romantic love, but also love between family and friends.

It was very confusing to me as a child, because I’d always been told that love was unconditional, independent of everything else. “For God so loved the world…” Yet even there, it seemed conditional on our returning that love in the form of obedience and worship. I was told that if I sinned enough or refused to worship God a certain way, I’d be doomed to burn in a pit of molten lava for eternity.

Then it was explained to me that it was like parental love. If we disobeyed our parents, we were punished. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” The punishment was to teach us a lesson. Okay, I can accept that, though I didn’t much like having my ass tanned by that belt. And no, I didn’t think of it as abuse even though I don’t spank my kids. It was just the default punishment back then. I prefer the non-violent alternatives for my own children. I get better results. But I digress.

So why didn’t God just kick our asses here on earth to teach us a lesson? What lesson am I learning roasting in hell for an eternity other than it’s damn HOT? To confuse little Sume even more, I was told that no one loved me, could ever love me as much as God. The only way I could resolve this as a child was to think the greater the love, the greater the punishment. The more someone loved you, the more unforgiving they were when you fell short.

Is it any wonder I learned to love or how to be loved at all? Why would I ever want anything to do with it at all? Fortunately, it’s part of what makes us human and something we don’t thrive very well without. We seek it out because something in us needs to give it as well as receive it. It’s part of what connects us to one another.

So what does all this have to do with the quote? If I take it down to a purely human level, what it says to me is that spiritual love in its purest form is independent of everything else. It can cross time, distance and difficulty in tact. It just is and will remain so.

On an emotional level, love for my parents has faced some serious challenges. I don’t hate them for their mistakes nor do I feel I owe them love for all the things they’ve done for me. I appreciate everything, but it’s not why I love them. We are connected by something much deeper which allows it to survive all the battering. It’s a connection that binds me just as strongly to them as it does my Vietnamese mother. I can’t explain the how or why. It’s just something that I know.

I can say without any doubt that I love my Vietnamese mother. Emotionally yes, I want to see and touch her. I may be freaked out initially if I ever found her and she turned out differently than I’d expected. It doesn’t change my deep spiritual connection to her. Nothing can touch that.

When I seek to find peace within myself, that is where I’m learning to look. The inner wars and the outside battles are all there, but my deep sense of connection to the universe is what saves me in the end. It’s there that I know I’ll find love in its truest form and for a moment, everything else falls away.

Another book that’s in my reading list is When Heaven Fell by Carolyn Marsden. A fellow TRA sister pointed it out several days ago. Right off the bat, the idea of this one just flat out pisses me off.

It’s bad enough when people put words in the mouths of adoptees, now they’re doing it to our birth families? And on top of that, she writes a book from a supposed Vietnamese perspective involving war and poverty? Reading this book is going to be about as enjoyable as reading Digging to America.

Maybe I should just read the other book also entitled When Heaven Fell. Ironically, the plot summary reads “Human mercenary Athol Morrison returns to Earth after serving in the legions of the Master Race. It’s been 20 years, and his friends, and Earth, have changed.”

I’m still sorting and trying to make sense of the senseless so what I write these days may look like the garbled ramblings of a lunatic. I have pried one small piece of information from that great vault of secrets. It’s very small but enough to shatter everything I thought I knew about my past except for what’s on my adoption papers.

The funny thing is that the old paradox once again comes in to play.

I’m probably not my father’s biological daughter. I don’t have to rewrite the adoptee part of my identity.

My father never even knew my mother’s name. She may still be alive.

Identity-wise, there’s a bit of twist there. There is the smallest of possibilities that I could be a Vietnamese/Chinese hybrid, but that too might never be known. Remember all those people who kept telling me I looked Chinese? As one of my TRA friends pointed out, I may have to go back and apologize to all those people for yelling at them.

That all hinges of course, on whether he’s telling the truth.

See my dilemma? I thought not to share this at all, but decided it’s just too hilarious not to. I suppose I should be more angry than I actually feel having found out that everything I’d been told was a flat out lie. Then there’s the possibility that I couldn’t get any angrier without offering proof that spontaneous human combustion actually exists.

So as it stands, I must begin in Cholon, Saigon with a woman named Ta Kim Cuc whose father owned a large trucking company back in 1970.

I think I could deal with everything beginning and ending there. However, if this turns out to be another fabrication, I hope there’s a fire extinguisher nearby.

When I think of Má or imagine what it would be like to see her again, I always picture myself as a little girl. She is the part of me that never grew beyond the longing to connect with the blood that first mapped my veins. I want to romanticize her but have seen too many Hollywood produced movies to maintain the image.The long haired, dignified beauty dressed in flowing white ao dai shifts into a woman offering American soldiers a bargain price for what could be their last piece of ass before they’re sent home to their parents in a body bag. “Me love you long time, GI. Then maybe my uncle will blow you away.” The green of mountain and field in the background becomes paved over by the gray, battered streets of Sài Gòn.

Yes, Full Metal Jacket did its job well and left me unable to accept that old lie, “You were a princess in need of rescue.”

My vile virility is vigilant, but the bellowing heaps bring no relief to a person frozen in grief like a mausoleum cherub. Every shameful tear shed in this ocean I cross cannot be accounted for, as clouds of salt react, divide, and one side invades the other, back and forth, until the love between mother and child swirls past in endless black rivulets. Surrounded by infantrymen hauling rows of skulls topped with blood and emptying them into the water, the screams come pouring out and then spread across the surface. Hands emerge with orange flames alight inside each of their palms. I roll in upon their fingertips and fall asleep to the languid flutter of flags.

“Daughter of war and sin dancing on a cloud of napalm, can you ever know what it is to be innocent?”

As a child, I learned to dodge the bullets
shot from my mother’s mouth
when she confused me for a bull’s eye,

“You have your father’s toes.”

By the time I became a teenager,
my skin was already scorched and smoldering
from the bomb that my father had dropped.

“You have your father’s dna.”

Now in my adulthood, I clutch in my hand
what little remains of my identity
like a freshly fired piece of shrapnel.

“You have your father’s lies.”

4.

At night I would listen for the footsteps in the hallway, soft knocks on the door and giggling when I opened it. In time, these children had crawled back up through the heavy soil, separated for so long from a familiar touch, clutching air for mother’s hair. The story book would explain that in years past these children drank from the pools of curiosity and then lulled to sleep, their bodies would convulse under the laying of hands. Their spirits would flee their fleshy domains, drained of all suspicion, into the black shapeless night. There, they would burn in the distance, these shining orbs, trapped souls in flames.

Child of smoke and fire, how many times will you sift the ashes of your funeral pyre?

I dug deep into my father’s soul
to uncover Má’s grave only to find
my own infant body sprawled
among the still smoldering remains
of some nameless village.

Má was no where to be found.

My hands instinctively covered my eyes
against what I knew would follow.
I’ve never gotten use to that
sudden flash of illumination

as all I thought I knew is seared away.

Unmade, I again find myself
atop a pillar of fire drifting
on the wake of my own destruction.

My small hands reach out in wispy tendrils
and with the gentlest of motions
ease my father’s finger from the trigger.